1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to content management systems for Web sites and more particularly to systems and methods for enabling information relating to content organization and services to be deployed from an enterprise level content management system to different end-user facing platforms.
2. Related Art
Internet sites (or Web sites) consist of a set of pages containing the content of the site. The pages consist of content items such as articles, graphics and the like, arranged in a viewable display. While the management of the content items is transparent to the end-user, it is important to be able to manage the content of the Web sites in a manner which is efficient and which allows the needs of the individual sites to be met.
Generally speaking, it is desirable for the content of a web site (the “content”) to have a resting home. In other words, there should be a location in which it permanently resides. Typically, there are large numbers of content items that are available to a site, so it is convenient to maintain the content in the form of a file system. This file system organizes the site's content repository, which is simply the collection of all of the content that is available to the site. Copies of the content repository, which are essentially snapshots of the content repository at a given time, can then be deployed to the platforms that support Web sites that use the included content.
The content repository is typically where the content of the site is managed. For example, security, access control and workflow normally take place at the level of the content repository rather than at the level of the site itself. These functions are performed by a content management system that operates on the items in the content repository.
Content management systems are of particular importance in situations in which an enterprise owns or operates multiple Web sites. In this case, individual content items often have to be deployed to more than one place. In other words, these content items may be used by many different Web sites, which themselves may be supported by many different hardware and software configurations.
The task of coordinating the shared use of these content items among these different hardware/software configurations is a daunting one. The difficulty arises, at least in part, as a result of several problems. For example, content items residing in any content repository are normally deployed to a site by providing a copy of the content repository to the site, as shown in FIG. 1. This copy is, as indicated above, a snapshot of the content repository. If changes are made to the repository itself, the previously deployed copies are no longer current. In order to make the sites' copies current, new copies must be deployed, and his incremental changes to the copies of the repository cannot be made. This can consume large amounts of resources. Another problem is that existing systems do not provide versioning functionality. Without this capability, sites' copies of the repository may not include current versions of content items, or they may include versions that are obsolete, unauthorized, or are similarly flawed.